How to do literature review: Creswil Five-Step literature review method

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John W. Creswell (QQPM)
Clifton Professor
Educational Psychology
College of education and Human Sciences
University of Nebraska-lincoln

The literature review extracts the existing literature in a Subject field, summarizes the current situation of the research in this field, and discovers the problems and angles that need further study from the existing literature and the past work.

Literature review is a topic, problem or research topic in a certain field to collect a large amount of information, analysis of the current topic, problems or research topics of the latest progress, academic insights and suggestions, so as to reveal the relevant issues of new dynamics, new trends, new levels, new principles and technologies, etc., for follow-up research to find a starting point, Foothold and breach.

The literature review looks simple. In fact, it is a difficult job. In foreign countries, macro or comparative systematic literature reviews are usually made by the top "Daniel" in a field. In the work of the existing research methods, there is guidance on the literature review, however, the majority of the teachers in the literature review course or the students who study the course have not paid enough attention to it. And to really do their own research, we found that the review is really difficult.

John W. Creswil (John W. Creswell) has proposed a model of the factors that a literature review must have. His five-step review of the literature is really worth learning and drawing on.

Creswil that the literature review should consist of five parts: Preface, Topic 1 (about the independent variable), subject 2 (about the dependent variable), subject 3 (study on the independent variable and the dependent variable), summary .

1. The preamble tells the reader a few parts of the literature review, which is a statement of the composition of the chapters. In my view, it is equivalent to the general description of the literature review.

2. The review Topic 1 presents the academic literature on "independent variables or multiple independent variables". In several arguments, consider only a few small parts or focus on only a few important single variables. Remember to only discuss the literature on the independent variables. This model can make a review of the literature and the dependent variables separately, and the reader is clearly and distinctly read.

3. The review topic 2 incorporates the academic literature with "dependent variables or multiple dependent variables", although there are multiple dependent variables, but only a small part of each variable is written, or only a single, important dependent variable is concerned.

4. The review of Topic 3 contains the academic literature on the relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable. This is the trickiest part of our research program. This part should be fairly short and includes the closest research to the subject of the planned study. Perhaps there is no literature on the subject of the study, it is necessary to find as close to the subject as possible, or to summarize the topic-related studies mentioned at a broader level.

5. At the end of the review, put forward a summary highlighting the most important studies, seizing the important topics in the review, and pointing out why we should do more research on this topic. In fact, this is not only to summarize the literature review, but more importantly to find the cornerstone of the study you are going to work on (the shoulders of predecessors), which is the starting point of your research.

In my opinion, John W. Creswil's five-step review of literature, steps 1th, 2, and 3 are not difficult in practice, since the research review of these topics is, after all, at a distance from the core issues of your research. The hard part is the 4th step, a review of topic 3. It's difficult. One is not enough reading, the most relevant documents can not be found, the second is the analysis is not deep, find their own research "predecessors shoulder", starting point, research foothold, their possible breakthroughs and so on. This is the real difficulty. So, for the 4th-Step Review of Topic 3, my personal view is "not short" and should be long. Because this is what you need to carefully analyze and compare.

In any case, John W. Creswil's five-step review of literature is a relatively replicable method of literature review before there is no better method.